


Flicker From View

by iaminarage



Category: Glee
Genre: Angst, Coping, Death, Gen, Grief, No Spoilers, the major character death is finn, there are no surprises
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-08-17
Updated: 2013-08-17
Packaged: 2017-12-23 18:51:48
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,438
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/929887
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/iaminarage/pseuds/iaminarage
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In the wake of Finn’s death, Kurt does the only thing he knows how to do. He puts things away.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Flicker From View

**Author's Note:**

> This fic is not based on spoilers of any kind. 
> 
> Apparently on tumblr last night I reached the point where I needed to process this whole situation through writing. This showed up in my head and wouldn’t leave. I’m sure plenty of other people have already written fic along these lines but I needed to put the words on paper. I’m not going to ask anyone to read it who doesn’t feel ready. I kind of had to take lunch right after writing it, so that’s the headspace any way. If it helps, my beta thought it was worth reading.
> 
> The title comes from Mumford & Sons’ “Ghosts That We Knew”. “The ghosts that we knew will flicker from view and we’ll live a long life.”

In the end, it was Kurt and Puck who cleaned out Finn’s room at the University of Lima. In retrospect, it was never going to be anyone else. Carole and Burt couldn’t. Carole was lost and Burt was doing his best to hang on to her, to keep her together while trying to grieve for himself as well. Rachel was, well, completely unqualified. She’d never been a good man in the storm even when the storm was a flurry, and this was beyond anything she’d experienced. Rachel was learning how to grieve and, on top of it, trying to figure out how to categorize herself in all the grief. She was Finn’s fiancée once but hadn’t been his girlfriend in months. Kurt could tell that this line of thinking made her feel selfish and guilty. She hadn’t yet learned that grief was selfish. 

It would be Carole who solved Rachel’s confusion. They would walk up to the funeral home the morning of Finn’s wake and find Rachel sitting outside on the sidewalk. She would look dazed when they arrived, the look of someone who’d forgotten where they were. Kurt would ask her later how long she’d been there, and she’d tell him she’d been there since sunrise. When they arrived, Rachel would apologize and say that she hadn’t meant to intrude, she just didn’t know where else to go. Carole would look, startled, at the tiny girl in the black dress who had loved her son and tell her to come inside. She would tell Rachel that she should be there anyways because she was Finn’s family, too. For a moment, Rachel would look more grateful than Kurt had ever seen her. 

But, for now, Kurt folded shirts into boxes piled around Finn’s room. Puck was a good partner for this, it turned out. He had to clean out his side of the room since, according to the University of Lima, he didn’t even live there. He quietly packed his own things in another side of the room, interjecting when Kurt came across something he couldn’t decide on. Puck was there to explain all the things that were too old or too new for Kurt’s knowledge of his brother.

So Kurt folded, sorting things he recognized, things that had meaning, into one box and sorting things like clothes that were just clothes and textbooks Finn had barely touched into boxes to be donated. The donation boxes were important to Kurt. He knew it wasn’t what most people might do at this point, but he also knew that everything of Finn’s was about to become a shrine. They didn’t need to make a shrine to things that didn't matter. It was enough to have the things that did.

It was better that Kurt do this, anyways. It was the only way he knew how to cope. He’d have cooked, but the house had been full of food within hours. So instead he called the funeral home, spoke to the florist, chose the songs, and made a post on Finn’s facebook page thanking everyone for their support and telling them where to make donations in Finn’s name. It was a charity that supported arts education for underprivileged kids in Ohio. Kurt figured it was what Finn would have wanted. And he folded.

When this was done, Kurt would prepare the house for everyone to come home. All of the old New Directions kids were coming back. Kurt appreciated that because, in his world, when there is a funeral, you just show up. You cancel whatever plans you have, you find a flight, you get in the car, and you show up. Mike and Mercedes and Quinn were probably on planes at that moment. Rachel, Santana, and Kurt had come back as soon as Kurt had gotten the call. But he wasn’t going to think about that. It didn’t help anything.

Kurt folded. He ran his fingers over the soft cotton of Finn’s most warn McKinley Football t-shirts and folded them into the keep box. The button ups and jeans were stiffer, not as smooth under his hands. Most of these got folded into the donate box. The textbooks and sports magazines went with them. Puck took most of the gaming stuff, because what would they do with it, really? Kurt found the NYADA hoodie he’d gotten Finn for Christmas hanging over the back of Finn’s desk chair. He could tell it had been worn frequently and he pulled the sweatshirt into his arms for a moment, taking a deep breath. He put it in the keep box, even though he didn’t know where it would end up, because he wasn’t ready to let it go.

He’d been hoping it would help, standing in the quiet room with Puck working at his side, the distant noise of college students enjoying early spring weather in their ears. He’d been hoping that, by folding up and putting away all of the pieces of Finn’s life at school, Kurt would begin to find a way to understand what had happened. He knew he was still numb, still on autopilot, still waiting for his brother to walk through that door and ask him what on earth he was doing.

Kurt thought that, perhaps, through this task he would be able to process the loss. He’d tried repeating it to himself over the last few days. “Finn is gone. Finn is dead. Finn will not be here to hug you goodbye, to call you little brother even though you are older, to eat all the food in the house, to forget to put his shoes away, to share a glasses of warm milk on nights when you both can’t sleep. Finn is dead.” But it wasn’t helping. He couldn’t make himself believe it. So instead, he tried to think about who Finn had been, who Kurt had lost: the bully who had tossed him into dumpsters; the tentative friend who wasn’t ready yet to stand up for him; the football player with dreams bigger than his skill; the step-brother who had taken his hand at their parents’ wedding; the lead singer of Glee club who had wanted so desperately to understand what it meant to be a leader, to be a man, and had never really found the answer; the high school star who had found that he didn’t know what he wanted out of the world when it was over, who had tried so desperately to figure out what he was supposed to be, who had hurt people in the process but also helped people more than he knew; the brother who had hugged him tightly in the loft in New York that day when both of their plans seemed to be falling apart; the man who had finally decided that he wanted to be a teacher, learned that he might even be good at it, finally believed that he’d found the path he’d been looking for.

Kurt folded and tried to fold all his memories of Finn into the box with the alarm clock and the charger to a phone Finn no longer even owned. He tried to put them somewhere where they couldn’t hurt him anymore. But he knew he couldn’t. He’d known Finn too long and too well to believe it would be so easy. He knew that all of them would never be the same.

Kurt finished folding and looked around the room. He realized it was empty and it felt like a punch to the stomach. There was nothing left here to tell anyone who Finn had been, in all his strange, complicated imperfection. It seemed like it should be harder to fold an entire life up and move it out. It seemed like there should be some sort of mark, some sort of scar, left behind. But, he supposed, there was another room, and it would be a long time before that one was cleaned.

They packed the goodwill boxes into Puck’s truck and the rest into Burt’s. They parted once they made the donation and Puck held on to Kurt for a while in the parking lot.

On the way home, “Don’t Stop Believin’” came on the radio and Kurt changed his course to pull into, of all places, the parking lot at Breadstix. It was nearly empty in the middle of the day and he parked in the back. He wasn’t going in anyways. He pulled his knees up to his chest between him and the steering wheel and let the memories run through him. And, for the first time since that terrible phone call, he cried.


End file.
